Feb. 12, 2016 Staff Report
The City Council has set aside funding for the Department of Education to hire its first LGBT Community Liaison.
The liaison will support the implementation of a literacy program with gay authors as well as LGBT curriculum development for teachers, according to Council Member Daniel Dromm’s office.
Dromm, who came out as a gay public school teacher in 1992, said the LGBT Community Liaison appointment marks “the culmination of a career’s worth of advocacy for me.”
“The Department has taken a bold step forward to assure students and teachers alike that anti-gay discrimination will not be tolerated and that, in fact, the department will look for ways to be more inclusive of the LGBT communities,” Dromm said in a statement. “I am so proud that the Council was able to provide the funding for this position and for the curriculum work that will be done.”
The first LGBT Community Liaison will be Jared Fox, a former teacher who founded the New York City chapter of the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network.
As liaison, his responsibilities will include assisting schools in collecting data and establishing Gay-Straight Alliances, developing the DOE transgender student guidelines and creating a strategic plan for the DOE to best serve the needs of LGBT students, teachers and staff.
Fox will also implement a literacy program in conjunction with the Lambda Literary Foundation that will introduce LGBT authors of color into classrooms. The literacy program will begin this spring.
A total of $200,000 was allocated for the LGBT Community Liaison position and associated programming. Fox began working with school communities a few weeks ago, according to Dromm’s office.
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